Don’t you get frustrated when an election campaign that seemed to be ending just goes on and on?

You’re tired of the TV ads, the candidates
are tired of traveling and giving speeches, and the campaign volunteers
are just plain tired. Worst of all, you suspect it doesn’t have to be
this way.

I’m not talking about just the
Clinton-Obama race — the complexity of the presidential primary system
is in a category of its own. I’m talking about our local nonpartisan
races that may or may not end with the primary election in May,
depending on whether any candidate gets a majority of the votes.

And so we have the competition between
Kitty Piercy and Jim Torrey for mayor of Eugene, and the race between Bobby
Green and Rob Handy for the North Eugene county Commission seat. In
each case, with a shift of just 1.5 percent of the vote the race would
now be over.

Instead, these races will now drag out another half a year until the general election in November.

Some might be tempted to blame the couple
of “minor” candidates in each race, each of whom had next to no
prospect of winning but still collected enough votes to keep either of
the two “major” candidates from getting a majority. But this blame
would be totally misplaced — they earned their votes fair and square,
and have as much right to run for office as any other citizen.

No, the blame should be placed squarely on
our electoral system. And your suspicion was correct — it doesn’t have
to be this way.

Our electoral system was not carved in
stone and handed down to us from George Washington and friends; it has
evolved over time and been changed when necessary.

In my opinion it is now necessary to
change it again. The solution to this problem and a host of others is
actually to be found in an unused section of the Oregon Constitution,
Section 16 of Article II: “Provision may be made by law for the voter’s
direct or indirect expression of his first, second or additional
choices among the candidates for any office.”

Voters could be given the option of
ranking candidates in order of preference, for example: My first choice
is candidate C, my second choice is candidate A, and my third choice is
candidate D. This is called preferential voting, more commonly known in
the United States as instant runoff voting. If no candidate gets a
majority of votes — as happened in the Piercy-Torrey and Green-Handy
races — then the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and the
results are recalculated using each voter’s top choice among the
remaining candidates.

That is why preferential voting is called
“instant runoff” — because you don’t have to have a second election,
with all of the additional costs of time, energy, money and patience
involved.

The choice of a majority of voters is
settled in one election, after one campaign; we need not go through the
processing of campaigning and voting a second time.

IRV was invented in Britain and America
but has been used most extensively in Australia, where it was first
implemented a century ago. A movement to institute IRV in the United
States has been spreading over the past two decades, and a host of
cities and counties in various states have voted to adopt it. Judging
by those that have implemented it (notably San Francisco), it works
fine and the voters love it.

Not least among its several advantages
over our current system is that IRV opens up the political system by
freeing potential candidates from the “spoiler” accusation and voters
from the “wasted vote” worry. If you really like what you hear from one
of those “minor” candidates, you can support her or him without feeling
like you are hurting the “major” candidate you prefer — just make the
latter your second choice.

Imagine doing without the May primary
election for our local races, and enduring just one campaign season
before the general election in November. Imagine having the option of
ranking the candidates in the order of your preference. Imagine being
able to take candidates seriously if they have good ideas but not much
money or name recognition.

All of this is possible, if we bring instant runoff voting to Lane County elections.

Alan F. Zundel of Eugene is a former political science professor at the
University of Nevada — Las Vegas and the president of a new local
group, IRV-Lane County (www.irv-lane.org).